Tuesday, March 15, 2005

Yasmin's 'Dangerous Delusions'

Interesting article in yesterday's Independent by Yasmin Alibhai Brown about the 'ripple' of democracy in the Middle East . No link beause the Indy make you pay for the archive. But here are some choice highlights:

"The 'ripple' claims are both absurd and dangerous. Why not go further back in time to seek cause and effect? Why not give credit for these welcome rumbles of change across the Middle East to the 11 September attacks [...]? If those hadn't happened, then the Taliban wouldn't have fallen..."

This line is quite startling. By this logic Zionists should give thanks for the Holocaust as it undoubtedly hastened the creation of the state of Israel. I think Yasmin fails to see the difference in intention. The intention behind 9/11 was not to democratise the Middle East. Whatever other motives one may impute to Bush & Blair demicratisation WAS and IS very much parted of their stated aims. So that observation seemed a bit silly really (though it did remind me of a discussion with JP about how historical events end up as morally ambivalent as even 'good' things can come out of 'bad' and vice versa. But I don't think that's YAB's point.)

The other bit I wanted to share was this:

"An acquaintance of mine, a Jordanian professor, says in a furious email he wrote after hearing these claims of the virtuous domino effect: '[...T]hey must think Arabs are stupid to believe that their democratic longings will come out of this state terror of the UK and the US and Israel.'"

YAB doesn't give the full context but if the Jordanian prof is writing about the Iraq war then I find something disturbing about the inclusion of Israel in that list (and in YAB's unquestioning acceptance of it.) Perhaps I'm missing the point so am open to being enlightened. And at the risk of seeming churlish those 'democratic longings' of which the prof speaks haven't seen that much manifestation till now...

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